American Airlines Flight 5342 and its passengers were the victims of a helicopter that either did not obey control tower instructions or failed to see the jet before it hit it, aviation expert JP Tristani told Newsmax Thursday.
"First and foremost is that the airliner did not collide with the helicopter," Tristani, a former commercial pilot and U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilot, said on Newsmax's "National Report," adding that it is "very apparent" that the U.S. Army Black Hawk "just flew into the airliner."
He pointed out that the control tower attempted to contact the pilot of the helicopter, which was on a training mission, but there was no response.
According to reports early Thursday, an air traffic controller less than 30 seconds before the impact had asked the helicopter if it had the plane in sight.
The controller, moments later, told the helicopter: "PAT 25 pass behind the CRJ," and seconds after that, the collision happened.
"The UH-60 helicopter has both the civilian VHF radio and the military UHF radio," said Tristani. "It also has a warfighting radar ability to detect any threats in the sky around it. So you have a kind of a contributing factor here. Primarily, the cause of the accident was because a helicopter flew into an airliner on an approach to land normal."
Meanwhile, the collision avoidance system on the airliner would have become inoperative below 1,500 feet above ground, said Tristani.
"It had no warning whatsoever of where that chopper was coming from unless it was coming head-on, and then it would be a matter of seconds before they could even bother to react," he said.
It is also not unusual that the airliner would be in pieces after the crash, because "When you have a helicopter encounter any type of a civilian airliner or civilian aircraft, it's like running into a buzz saw," Tristani said.
Further, with the aircraft colliding in the air, "you didn't have any controlled flight into the water," he added. "You just had an explosion and debris coming down."
Meanwhile, there was a "complete breakdown of communications, and it all lies on the helicopter," Tristani said.
"Why did it not alter its flight path, and why did it not say very clearly, I have the jet in sight right there," he said. "The helicopter did not respond on either one of those two radios, or the tower would not have had time to broadcast on the emergency frequency, and even if it did, from those flight paths, you were just talking two minutes before the collision."
Tristani also said he does not expect there to be much information from the cockpit voice recorder, "except maybe an expletive from the pilots from the shock of the hit."
Meanwhile, it would not be a surprise to see a military helicopter and commercial airliners share space in the D.C. area, as Andrews Air Force Base, which houses Navy and Marine fighters, as well as the president's aircraft, are nearby, said Tristani.
"When you talk about a training aircraft that's on a training mission, as I said, that helicopter is a warbird," he said. "It carries a radar inside there … the fault lies in the communication that the tower made to the helicopter to change your flight path, and he did not respond."
Instead, "he headed right at the commercial airliner and essentially took it down," said Tristani.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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